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The literature unanimously agrees that industrial diversification is path dependent: new industries build on the pre-existing capabilities of regions that are partly embodied and reflected in the skills of the region's workforce. This paper explicitly accounts for regional capabilities as workforce skills to build skill relatedness and skill complexity measures, that is, the skill-spaces, for 107 Italian regions for the period 2013–19. The data-driven techniques we use reveal that skill-spaces form two highly polarised clusters into social–cognitive and technical–physical skills. We find evidence that social–cognitive skills yield the highest probabilities of regional competitive advantage. A comparison with co-location-based measures shows that our measures are able to capture a substantial part of regional capabilities that cannot be measured with previous measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geospatial social media (GSM) data has been increasingly used in public health due to its rich, timely, and accessible spatial information, particularly in infectious disease research. This review synthesized 86 research articles that use GSM data in infectious diseases published between December 2013 and March 2022. These articles cover 12 infectious disease types ranging from respiratory infectious diseases to sexually transmitted diseases with spatial levels varying from the neighborhood, county, state, and country. We categorized these studies into three major infectious disease research domains: surveillance, explanation, and prediction. With the assistance of advanced computing, statistical and spatial methods, GSM data has been widely and deeply applied to these domains, particularly in surveillance and explanation domains. We further identified four knowledge gaps in terms of contextual information use, application scopes, spatiotemporal dimension, and data limitations and proposed innovation opportunities for future research. Our findings will contribute to a better understanding of using GSM data in infectious diseases studies and provide insights into strategies for using GSM data more effectively in future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how guests' preferences in peer-to-peer (P2P) accommodations changed during the COVID-19 summer season. Specifically, we test the importance of attributes that better allow for preserving the social distancing. To this end, we adopt a semi-parametric hedonic pricing model. We take the city of Madrid as a compelling case study of an important tourist destination severely hit by the crisis. We show that guests' marginal willingness to pay for social distancing characteristics has changed from August 2019 to August 2020. In particular, we find that whereas listings with kitchen amenities increase 15.2 percentage points their premium price in August 2020 with respect to the previous year, the marginal willingness to pay for size-related characteristics decreased by 2.7 percentage points. Results are robust to sample and time composition. This study provides meaningful findings of a shift in guests' tastes towards social distancing attributes on P2P accommodations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inter-country related events which have been reported by news media have become important data for the study of international and regional cooperation relations. Cooperation event data from 1980 to 2015 were used to judge the positions and roles of countries located along the Belt and Road. This study's results indicate that the regional cooperation of the countries along the Belt and Road formed a bidirectional hub network structure with China and Russia as the core. The unbalanced pattern revealed showed that East Asia and South Asia were located at the core and periphery respectively; Central and Eastern Europe, along with Western Asia and the Middle East regions, were closely connected; and Central Asia was weakly connected. The level of differences, openness degree differences, and economic scale differences of the countries along the aforementioned line were found to have important influences on the strengths of the cooperative relationships. A single-center radiation structure and a multi-center tight structure were found to be the significant regional characteristics of the spatial organization pattern of the cooperation relationship network. The study provides a new perspective for identifying the structural characteristics and regional patterns of international regional cooperation relationship networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many Russians believe that local engineers are very creative. Historically, however, the numerous inventions created by Russian innovators have rarely ended up as commercialized products. Are Russian engineers indeed creative in comparison to their foreign colleagues? What motivations are associated with this creativity? Is such a shared conception of creativity a barrier to the nation's development of innovations? I propose to answer these questions using interviews with Russian technopreneurs. For comparison with the Russian case, I will use another set of interviews with technopreneurs collected in three countries—South Korea, Taiwan and Finland—each of which can be characterized by different cultural contexts and level of technological development. I summarize the main findings of a collective research project, which employs Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot's idea of 'economies of worth.' The study demonstrates that the basic mixes of 'orders of worth' are varied across the selected countries. In Russia, this mix includes the industrial, the inspired and the market orders; in Taiwan, the market, the industrial and the domestic; in South Korea, the industrial, the domestic and the market; and in Finland, the project-base, the industrial and the market. Focusing on detailed analysis of the worlds of justification among Russian technopreneurs, the article argues that, contrary to the Finnish, South Korean, and Taiwanese cases, creativity and inspiration, together with values of producing technologies for their own sake, are prevailing motivations for Russian engineers. That can explain obstacles in the way of successful commercialization and technological development in the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the impact of product innovation announcements on firm value using an extensive data set of bio-pharmaceutical products. We find that two main effects shape observed firm value changes: a 'probability effect', which depends on how investors perceive the product's likelihood of success, and a 'portfolio effect' that depends on the relative importance of a product within a company's portfolio. We estimate product-specific success probabilities using various machine learning methods. The portfolio importance is measured by product and date-specific net present values. We find that market reactions increase in the portfolio importance of the product under development and diminish in its success probability. Our results aid corporations and investors in evaluating the financial consequences of innovation-related news. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the spatial and temporal diffusion of political violence in North and West Africa by endeavoring to represent a group leader's mental landscape as he contemplates strategic targeting. We assume that this representation is a combination of the physical and social geography of the target environment, and the mental and physical cost of following a seemingly random pattern of attacks. Focusing on the distance and time between attacks and taking into consideration the transaction costs that state boundaries impose, we wish to understand what constrains a group leader to attack at a location other than the one that would yield the greatest overt payoff. We leverage functional data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project (ACLED) dataset that catalogs violent extremist incidents in North and West Africa since 1997 to generate a network whose nodes are administrative regions. These nodes are connected by edges of qualitatively different types: undirected edges representing geographic distance, undirected edges incorporating the costs of crossing borders, and directed edges representing consecutive attacks by the same group. We analyze the resulting network using spectral embedding techniques that are able to account fully for the different types of edges. The result is a representation of North and West Africa that depicts its empirical permeability to violence. A better understanding of how location, time, and borders condition attacks enables planning, prepositioning, and response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of university-business cooperation (UBC) continues to grow. To date, however, our understanding of UBC in education is lacking, as is our knowledge of the motivations of academics. This research explores a comprehensive mix of motivations underlying education-driven UBC in the form of student mobility, curriculum design and delivery, and lifelong learning. Specifically, drawing on self-determination theory, motivations across five orientations are examined, namely monetary, career, research, educational and social. Based on an extensive and wide-reaching European survey, this research demonstrates the context-specific nature of academic motivations for UBC in education. Not only do the motivations differ from those commonly noted in relation to commercialisation, the set of motivations varies across different education-driven activities. This research offers important contributions to theory and practice, revealing that academics are motivated more strongly by intrinsic than extrinsic reasons, with only social and educational orientations emerging as significant motivations across all four activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A consensus notion in sales research is that superior performance requires high levels of effort. Studying the effect of individual and situational factors on effort has significant implications for managers and academics. This study shows that supportive leadership leads to higher salesperson effort directly and through a mediating process that involves intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy. Also, results indicate that the positive effect of supportive leadership on the salesperson's intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy is amplified when serving demanding customers. Implications for sales managers and future research opportunities are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People whom the author would like to thank for their assistance in the creation of the December 2016 issue of the journal "Regional Studies" are mentioned.

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This study examines the firm size distribution of US banks and credit unions. A truncated lognormal distribution describes the size distribution, measured using assets data, of a large population of small, community-based commercial banks. The size distribution of a smaller but increasingly dominant cohort of large banks, which operate a high-volume low-cost retail banking model, exhibits power-law behaviour. There is a progressive increase in skewness over time, and Zipf’s Law is rejected as a descriptor of the size distribution in the upper tail. By contrast, the asset size distribution of the population of credit unions conforms closely to the lognormal distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Frank Lichtenberg on the role of new pharmaceuticals in cancer treatments and another by Andrea Mina on the emergence and development of medical technologies.